Syrian Civil War from 2011-2023 in Guardian Headlines

Introduction

The aim of the project is to observe the change and the reflections of the war in the world by analysing the Guardian news headlines from the beginning of the Syrian civil war to the present day (2011-2023). The data was downloaded from the Guardian API using the search term “Syria”. In total 23,617 headlines were found for the 12 years period. Some of the articles were related to different topics such as earthquake but majority of them related to refugees and attacks in Europe.

Research Question

  • What were the topics of the headlines related to Syrian Civil War throughout the time (2011-2023)?

Hypotheses

  • While there was a softer discourse in the first couple of years of the war, the discourse changed after 2015 in the opposite direction.
  • In particular, the unidentified “terrorist” attacks in Europe in recent years have been associated with the Syrian war and refugees.

2. Data Visualisation 1: Number of headlines by the dates (01-01-2011 to 15-04-2023)

The visualisation illustrates the distribution of the number of headlines throughout the period of interest.Unsurprisingly the numbers are highest from 2014_2016 at the peak of the war.

2. Data Visualisation 2. Keywords

The top 5 keywords for each month with more than 200 headlines were calculated (39 in total. The head of the keywords table illustrates several events including the Paris attacks coinciding with the UK government debating airstrikes (row 1) and the chemical attacks in Ghouta (row 3).

top_headline_dates keywords
2015-11 paris , isis , attacks , airstrikes, refugees
2015-09 refugees, refugee , crisis , says , syrian
2013-09 chemical, weapons , us , obama , un
2014-09 isis , us , strikes, iraq , air
2015-12 isis , airstrikes, war , labour , says
2016-01 isis , refugee, uk , says , us

2. Data Visualisation 3. Word Cloud

The word cloud illustrates the top 100 words and bi_grams found in the entire Syrian headline corpus.It indicates the key players during the conflict including Trump, Islamic State, Russia, Assad and the UK.

2. Data Visualisation 3. Interactive Headline Plot

This plot summarises the distribution of headlines by month and is annotated with 3 important events of the time period.

Results & Conclusion

In this exercise, we analysed the changes in the headlines in the Guardian newspaper since the beginning of the Syrian civil war (2011). Out of a total of 23617 news headlines, we noticed 39 dates that we came across most frequently in news headlines about Syria. On the top of the list, in which Syria was mentioned the most, November 2015. Surprisingly, the date was related to the Paris attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks). The assaults, according to French President François Hollande, were an act of war by Islamic State and they were planned in Syria and organised by a terrorist cell in Belgium. The attackers were born in France and Belgium but also fought in Syria and they returned to France through flow of migrants and refugees from Syria. We could also argue from today that after these attacks, the policies and political discourse towards Syrian refugees and migrants have radically changed.

The top three dates are September 2013, November 2015 and October 2019. The headlines for the dates respectively; “Chemical attacks on Ghouta”, “Terrorists attack Paris and UK parliament debate airstrikes on Syria” and “Trump thanks Kurds for role in killing ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi”.

From August to September 2013, the fighting was the most intense since the the war started. In August 2013, a chemical strike occurred in the Damascus countryside’s Ghouta district, resulting in thousands of wounded and several hundred deaths in the opposition-held stronghold.

October 2019 was a critical time for Syrian civil war. Turkish president Erdogan has warned of a full-scale Turkish invasion of northern Syria. After Russia and Turkey made an agreement via the Sochi Agreement of 2019 to set up a Second Northern Syria Buffer Zone, in October 27, U.S. Joint Special Operations Command’s (JSOC) 1st SFOD-D (Delta Force) conducted a raid into Idlib province on the border with Turkey that resulted in the death of ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, striking a blow to the terror organization.

In conclusion, through the analysis of headlines in Guardian, we were able to catch the turning points of the Syrian civil war but also different connections to the war and the ISIS related issues. We thought that we could improve this exercise through examining the question “how the migration policies of countries have changed since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War?”. In particular, we could capture the possible changes in migration policies of Turkey, Lebanon and the European Union, in the last 12 years, in relation to headlines.